How productive are you really?

just wondering.while at work more often than not parkinson's law kicks in.i talk abot the rule , "work will expand to the time allotted to it"... iow, allot one day to a task that would normally take 1 hour and you can be 99.99% sure it will last the whole day to finish that job.

so if you have a job that needs to be done and you know the job will take like an hour, but you say to yourself "ah, by the end of the day is good enough" (i mean, your manager is back by then, so why hurry?) you can be sure you find all kind of diversions, check email, tweet something, contact your facebook connections, look up that one very interesting thing you heard about last night, check mail again and by 15:30h /16:00h you write that letter and be done with it by 17:00h. just in time to hand it to your manager.

task completed in one day... and how really productive were you?

i am currently investigating how often this happens and more important if it would be helpful if you find a tool that helps you to stay on track.just doing a little competition with yourself? would that be helpful?

also, i would like to know how often you run into the situation that you estimated something, start working on it and, when finished, you find the task took way much longer than estimated. would it be helpful if you have a tool you can use to track your time, so next time your estimates will be more accurate?